Martha and the Vandellas

Martha and the Vandellas

What Martha Reeves and the Vandellas might have become had it not been for Diana Ross and the Supremes is anyone’s guess, but to hear Reeves tell it, the group would have almost certainly been a larger player for a longer period on the R&B scene. Even though the vocal group’s peak occurred for but a few years early in its career in the 1960s, the hit singles produced by Martha and the Vandellas—including “Dancing in the Street,”“Heat Wave,” and “Nowhere to Run”—are among the most enduring in Motown and pop music history, having found their way onto soundtracks, radio play lists, and commercials decades after they were originally recorded. And in an era of sweet, sound-alike girl groups, the act distinguished itself as gutsier and grittier than most. Dubbing them “one of Motown’s edgiest outfits,” Paul Evans said of the group in the Rolling Stone Album Guide that their “best songs are all bass, brass, and thunder—the singers have to fight hard just to keep up.”

Reeves chronicled her humble beginnings in the autobiography Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva, co-authored with writer Mark Bego in 1994. She was the third oldest in a family of 12 children, and the first daughter. She was born July 18, 1941 in a house on Washington Street in Eufala, Alabama, where a midwife assisted her mother because the family couldn’t afford a doctor. Reeves didn’t remain in Alabama for long, however. She was just under a year old when the entire family pulled up stakes and moved to Detroit, where they lived with relatives who had relocated earlier in search of employment.

Reeves’ vocal talent was evident at a very young age. At the age of three, she and older brothers Benny and Thomas won a church talent contest. In her autobiography, she recalls being entranced by the entertainers she saw on stage and screen at the Paradise Theater in Detroit, where her godmother, Beatrice Lockett, took her to see the likes of Cab Calloway and others.

In 1960, Reeves (who also sang professionally around this time as “Martha LaVaille”) joined a group called the Del-Phis, which included Michiganders Annette Beard, Gloria Williamson, and Rosalind Ashford. The vocal group recorded the single “I’ll Let You Know” for Chess subsidiary Checkmate Records, but the single went nowhere. In her autobiography, Reeves blamed the label, accusing it of not supporting the act.

It was a mixture of luck and circumstance that brought Reeves and her Del-Phis to the attention of the Motown powers-that-be. After a chance encounter at Detroit’s Twenty Grand nightclub, Reeves got a job as secretary of Motown A&R director William “Mickey” Stevenson. While at work one day, she learned that background

vocalists were needed immediately for a recording session with Marvin Gaye. When other vocalists weren’t able to come to the studio, Reeves and her fellow Del-Phis were enlisted to sing backup on Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” and “Stubborn Kind of Fellow.” Then, when fellow Motown singer Mary Wells reportedly failed to appear for a recording session, Reeves and the Vandellas found themselves in the studio recording a single of their own, “I’ll Have to Let Him Go”—but not as the Del-Phis. Instead, the group was called Martha and the Vandellas, with “Vandella” taken from a merger of Van Dyke (a Detroit road near Reeves’ parents’ home) and singer Della Reese, a favorite of Reeves’. Martha and the Vandellas was thus officially formed in 1962. However, Williamson opted not to sign a contract with Motown and reportedly left the act at that point.

When another Martha and the Vandellas single, the ballad “Come and Get These Memories,” cracked the Top 40 in 1963, the powerful Motown songwriting and production trio of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland offered their song “Heat Wave” to the group. It became one of the band’s biggest hits, peaking at number four on the Billboard pop chart and topping the R&B chart for several weeks in 1963.

For several years thereafter, the hits continued to pour in for Martha and the Vandellas. “Quicksand” entered the Top 40 at the end of 1963, and later made its way into the Top 10, followed by what is probably the band’s best-known and biggest hit, 1964’s “Dancing in the Street,” which spent 11 weeks in the top 40 (including two weeks at number two).

Some critics today say Martha and the Vandellas’ popularity was at least partially due to the songs that the act received from Holland-Dozier-Holland, a conclusion that is borne out by the commercial and chart success of the band. The Holland-Dozier-Holland collaborations with Martha and the Vandellas turned out to be the most fruitful for the group, and occurred at the height of its popularity.

But, when Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in the late-1960s (after landing 28 songs in the top 20 for various artists, 12 of which hit number one between 1963 and 1966 alone), it turned out to be the beginning of a downturn for Martha and the Vandellas. As Joe McEwen and Jim Miller wrote in an essay on Motown in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, the “best Vandellas records were made with H-D-H [Holland-Dozier-Holland], but after the atypically infectious ‘Jimmy Mack’ in early 1967, the two teams went their separate ways. The result for Martha and the Vandellas was little short of disastrous.” Although Martha and the Vandellas scored two more top 40 hits after the top ten smash “Jimmy Mack” (a number one R&B hit)—including the number 11 hit “Honey Chile,” recorded under the name Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in 1967--those turned out to be the band’s last big hits.

The latter part of the band’s career was fraught with more change. While Beard had left the band in 1964 (to be replaced by former Velvelette Betty Kelly), the entire group was dormant between 1969 and 1971. When Reeves reformed the unit in 1971, it included her sister, Lois Reeves, and Sandra Tilley (another former Velvelette, albeit for a short stint). That incarnation was a brief one, though, and by 1972 Reeves had embarked on a solo career. Meanwhile, Lois joined the female vocal trio Quiet Elegance, organized by Temptations Melvin Franklin and Otis Williams. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas played its final show at Detroit’s Cobo Hall on December 21, 1972, according to the Reeves autobiography. Tilley died nearly a decade later, in 1981, during brain tumor surgery.

At the same time that the Vandellas’ popularity was waning, Reeves developed substance abuse problems from tranquilizers and uppers. She also bore a child out of wedlock to an abusive man she had dated only briefly. In her autobiography, she called her son, Eric Jermel Graham (born on November 10, 1970), “the greatest gift to me in this whole wide world” and “a reason to live a purposeful life.” Early in her solo career, Reeves was also briefly married to a disc jockey named Willie Dee. After that rocky period, a 1988 Ebony magazine article reported that the singer experienced a “religious rebirth” in 1977.

Although the heyday of the Vandellas was over, Reeves remained active as a singer, both with and without various Vandellas. In addition to touring, she recorded several solo albums, starting with a self-titled release in 1974. She joined female vocalists such as Brenda Lee, Leslie Gore, and Mary Wells for “The Legendary Ladies,” a 1987 special on the Cinemax cable network, and toured with Mary Wells and Temptations David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks the same year. Then, in 1989, Reeves recruited Ashford and Beard for a reunion Vandellas concert in Manchester, England; the three have periodically played and toured together since then. The three also filed suit against Motown Records in 1989 for back royalties for the song “Heat Wave;” Reeves wrote in her autobiography that they had not received any royalty checks for the music since 1972. In 1991, the suit was settled in favor of Reeves and the Vandellas after a settlement was reached between Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. and Reeves. “He [Gordy] said he was sorry it had gone so far,” Reeves told Jet magazine in 1991. Terms of the settlement were not made public.

There was some renewed interest in the group during the 1990s, a period that saw the release of several compilations of hits and singles. In 1995, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony in New York. Recalling her career in a 1988 Ebony article, Reeves said, “I sang because it made me happy and helped me to help my family. It allowed me to develop from a little girl in the ghetto to someone who could pay my bills…”

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Reeves, Martha

Contemporary Musicians
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning

Martha Reeves

Singer

As a member of the Motown label's Martha and the Vandellas, Martha Reeves was a large part of what Ebony magazine described as "the rousing pop sound that rocked Detroit and shook the world." Her lead vocals enriched a string of hits during the 1960s, including "Dancing in the Streets," "Heatwave," and "Jimmy Mack." After the final break-up of the Vandellas in the 1970s, Reeves became a solo artist; though she never achieved the same success as she had with the group, nostalgia for the pop music of the 1960s helped her regain her status as a popular concert attraction during the 1980s.

Reeves went to work at Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan, without much thought of becoming a singer. Rather, she served as a secretary for the company shortly after she left high school. She occasionally sang lyrics on demonstration tapes to enable Motown's artists to learn new songs, and when one of the company's regular studio back-up singers was too ill to participate in a recording session, Reeves was allowed to take her place. From there it was only a short step to becoming a regular Motown background vocalist. With Rosalind Ashford and Annette Sterling, who had attended high school with her, Reeves contributed her talents to the records of Marvin Gaye and other Motown proteges.

By 1963 the Motown executives felt that Reeves, Ashford, and Sterling had enough talent to form their own group, particularly with Reeves's strong voice on lead vocals. The women were signed to the Gordy label, a Motown subsidiary, and quickly released the hit single "Come and Get These Memories," which was soon followed by an even bigger smash, "Heat Wave." Though she hadn't aimed for that kind of success, Reeves told Ebony: "I sang because it made me happy and helped me to help my family. It allowed me to develop from a little girl in the ghetto to someone who could pay my bills."

After "Heat Wave," Sterling quit the Vandellas and was replaced by Betty Kelly. This personnel change did not impair the trio's hitmaking ability; with 1964's "Dancing in the Street," Martha and the Vandellas continued to trademark the rougher, more raucous rhythm and blues sound that distinguished them from the Supremes and other Motown female groups. According to Geoffrey Stokes in Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, the record's catchy beat was produced, in part at least, by one of the producers banging on the floor with some snow chains from an automobile.

Hits like "Nowhere to Run," "I'm Ready for Love," and "Honey Chile" took Reeves and the Vandellas through to the late 1960s. Kelly was replaced by Reeves's sister Lois in 1968, but the following year saw Reeves sidelined by illness. When the group re-formed in 1970, it was composed of Martha and Lois Reeves and another singer named Sandra Tilley. Though this set of Vandellas scored some minor hits on the rhythm and blues charts, including "Bless You," "I Gotta Let You Go," and "Tear It on Down" during the early 1970s, they could not match the success of Reeves's earlier years. She obtained her release from Motown, and broke up the Vandellas in 1972.

The success of Reeves's early solo career was no match for that of her heyday with the Vandellas, either. She bounced from record company to record company—MCA, Arista, and Fantasy all held her contract at one time or another—and only scored a minor hit in 1974 with "Power of Love." According to Ebony, Reeves experienced problems with depression and drug abuse during this period, but was healed by what that magazine termed a "religious rebirth" in 1977. Not long afterward, in the 1980s, nostalgia for her music brought her better luck with her career. She was also helped by other artists' remakes of her Motown hits, such as Linda Ronstadt's version of "Heat Wave." Reeves told Ebony: "I really appreciate them and love them for doing it."

Reeves continued to tour England as well as the United States with other former Motown stars, including Eddie Kendricks and Mary Wells. Commenting on one such excursion, she announced to Ebony: "It was fantastic. I am very proud that after all these years, we could still produce the quality of sound and remember all the things we were taught—the things that still make us happen." And apparently she no longer needed back-up singers. "Now that everybody knows the muic, the people in the audience are the Vandellas," she explained in Ebony.

In 1989 Reeves reunited with two of the original Vandellas, Annette Beard Sterling and Rosalind Ashford Holmes. Together the trio recorded "Step Into My Shoes" for British producer Ian Levine. In 1995 Martha and the Vandellas were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Reeves participated in a number of activities surrounding the event, including performing "Dancing in the Street" with singer John Mellencamp and a public discussion about her career. "There isn't anything I'd trade in for showbiz," she was quoted as saying in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Even when I can't sing, I can go back and be an A&R secretary." In 2003 Martha and the Vandellas were inducted into the Vocal Hall of Fame, and Reeves performed "Heat Wave" with Bruce Springsteen at Comercia Park in Detroit.

In 2004 Reeves released Home to You, an album that included a version of Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child" and a new version of "Jimmy Mack." In 2005, in celebration of Motown Records' 45th birthday, Reeves headlined a concert in London that included Smokey Robinson, Lionel Richie, and Gladys Knight.

In 2005 Reeves decided to run for city council in Detroit. On August 2nd, she won over 27,000 votes, winning ninth place (out of 120 candidates), and becoming one of the 18 candidates who would be placed on the general ballot for nine council positions in November. "I've been dancing in the street," she told Ron Vample in the Seattle Times. "This is not a need for a job. It's a job that needs to be done." While Reeves expressed her concern over the increased crime rate in Detroit and the need for increased police protection, she also expressed an interest in preserving and promoting the city's musical heritage. "One of my biggest dreams is to put up statues downtown—statues of Stevie Wonder," she told Vample, "and Smokey Robinson."

Reeves won the election, and joined the Detroit City Council in January of 2006. "I'm not a politician, there are a lot of things I need to learn. My main reason for being on the city council is to be the voice of the public," she told the WENN news network.

For the Record …

Born on July 18, 1941, in Detroit, MI; children: Eric.

Pop vocalist; worked as a secretary for Motown Records, early 1960s; studio backup singer for Motown, 1962–63; lead singer for Martha and the Vandellas, 1963–69, 1970–72; solo recording artist, 1974–80, and concert performer, 1974–; featured in cable television special "Legendary Ladies of Rock 'n' Roll," about 1987; reunited with original Vandellas, 1989; released Home to You, 2004; ran for Detroit City Council and won, 2005; sworn in as freshman member of Detroit City Council, 2006.

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Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites:

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Notes:

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Reeves, Martha

Martha Reeves

As a member of the Motown label’s Martha and the Vandellas, Martha Reeves was a large part of what Ebony magazine described as “the rousing pop sound that rocked Detroit and shook the world.” Her lead vocals enriched a string of hits during the 1960s, including “Dancing in the Streets,”“Heatwave,” and “Jimmy Mack.” After the final break-up of the Vandellas in the 1970s, Reeves became a solo artist; though she never achieved the same success as she had with the group, nostalgia for the pop music of the 1960s helped her regain her status as a popular concert attraction during the 1980s.

Reeves went to work at Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan, without much thought of becoming a singer. Rather, she served as a secretary for the company shortly after she left high school. She occasionally sang lyrics onto demonstration tapes to enable Motown’s artists to learn new songs, and when one of the company’s regular studio back-up singers was too ill to participate in a recording session, Reeves was allowed to take her place. From there it was only a short step to becoming a regular Motown background vocalist; with Rosalind Ashford and Annette Sterling, who had attended high school with her, Reeves contributed her talents to the records of Marvin Gaye and other Motown proteges.

By 1963, the Motown executives felt that Reeves, Ashford, and Sterling had enough talent to form their own group, particularly with Reeves’s strong voice on lead vocals. The women were signed to the Gordy label, a Motown subsidiary, and quickly released the hit single “Come and Get These Memories,” which was soon followed by an even bigger smash, “Heat Wave.” Though she hadn’t aimed for that kind of success, Reeves told Ebony:“I sang because it made me happy and helped me to help my family. It allowed me to develop from a little girl in the ghetto to someone who could pay my bills.”

After “Heat Wave,” Sterling quit the Vandellas and was replaced by Betty Kelly. This personnel change failed to have much impact on the trio’s hitmaking ability; with 1964’s “Dancing in the Street,” Martha and the Vandellas continued to trademark the rougher, more raucous rhythm and blues sound that distinguished them from the Supremes and other Motown female groups. According to Geoffrey Stokes in Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll,“Dancing in the Street’”s catchy beat was produced, in part at least, by one of the producers banging on the floor with some snow chains from an automobile.

Hits like “Nowhere to Run,”“I’m Ready for Love,” and “Honey Chile” took Reeves and the Vandellas through to the late 1960s. Kelly was replaced by Reeves’s sister Lois in 1968, but the following year saw Reeves sidelined by illness. When the group reformed in 1970, it was composed of Martha and Lois Reeves and another woman named Sandra Tilley. Though this set of Vandellas scored some minor hits on the rhythm and blues charts, including “Bless You,”“I Gotta Let You Go,” and “Tear It on Down” during the early 1970s, they could not match the success of Reeves’s earlier years. She obtained her release from Motown, and broke up the Vandellas in 1972.

The success of Reeves’s early solo career was no match for that of her heyday with the Vandellas, either. She bounced from record company to record company—MCA, Arista, and Fantasy all held her contract at one time or another—and only scored a minor hit in 1974 with “Power of Love.” According to Ebony, Reeves experienced problems with depression and drug abuse during this period, but was healed by what that magazine termed a “religious rebirth” in 1977. Not long afterward, in the 1980s, nostalgia for her music brought her better luck with her career. She was also helped by

Pop vocalist; worked as a secretary for Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan, during the early 1960s; studio backup singer for Motown, 1962-63; lead singer for Martha and the Vandellas, 1963-69, 1970-72; solo recording artist, 1974-80, and concert performer, 1974—. Featured in the cable television special “Legendary Ladies of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” about 1987.

other artists doing remakes of her Motown hits, such as Linda Ronstadt’s cutting a version of “Heat Wave.” Reeves told Ebony:“I really appreciate them and love them for doing it.”

Reeves continues to tour England and tours the United States with other former Motown stars, including Eddie Kendricks and Mary Wells. Commenting on one such excursion in July, 1987, she announced to Ebony:“It was fantastic. I am very proud that after all these years, we could still produce the quality of sound and remember all the things we were taught—the things that still make us happen.” And, apparently, she no longer needs back-up singers. “Now that everybody knows the music, the people in the audience are the Vandellas,” she explained in Ebony.

Citation styles

Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA).

Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites:

Modern Language Association

The Chicago Manual of Style

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Notes:

Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. However, the date of retrieval is often important. Refer to each style’s convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates.

In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list.